Pat’s Point of View

I’ve been very bad and not uploaded any photos of my girls for a long, long time. Busy I guess. But the two of them are growing steadily, too fast it seems, and are becoming good friends.

Evangeline is a little crawling machine, and today she started ‘talking’. It’s only baby talk but it’s very cute for an 8 month old. She’s very happy, always smiling, but she’s tough and doesn’t take any nonsense from her big sister. In fact, I think Evie will be the one dishing it out!

Grace is still talking up a storm; we’re just not sure which language she’s using sometimes! She’s almost 2 and a half, and bounding through each day like the curious and whacky chick that she is. I’ve started driving her to day-care three days a week on my way to work, and I’m looking forward to spending that time on the road with her.

It’s almost been a whole week since she was born and I have only just got around to posting some photos of Evie. I’ve picked out my favourites, above.

Thanks everyone who sent us messages of love and support, we really appreciate it. Evie is doing well, in fact she’s caught us off guard with how content and well behaved she is!

It’s been far too long since I showed off my little girl, so besides the four you see here, I’ve posted a bunch of photos from the last 5 months. There’s also another gallery I created some time back covers the three to five month period. Enjoy.

Thanks to all of you who keep asking how she is. She’s a healthy, happy little girl who enjoyed her first Christmas. She’s pretty much sleeping through the night now, so mum and dad are happy about that. She’s about to sprout her first tooth and should be walking any day now. She’s such a quick learner I doubt there’ll be much space between ‘first step’ and ‘sprinting’.

Lucky I have a terabyte of storage, I’m going to need it if we keep taking this many photos of our kids! Here’s a sample from weeks 6-12.

My little girl is growing fast, so I’ve posted a few photos so you can see how well she is doing.

She’s very animated but sometimes hard to interpret. For instance, in this photo is she is practising her a) scary face for Halloween b) Ice-T gangster rap, or c) what-to-do-in-an-armed-robbery look? Perhaps she’s pretending to be a pirate, I don’t know.

There aren’t many photos of her sleeping, that’s because it’s a bit of a rarity at this stage. Her mum is doing so well, I don’t know how she copes. I have it lucky, I have to go off to work, so I get to sleep at night!

The recent hot weather has paid off, we had some fairly good thunderstorms last night. I’ve worked out some good settings for my camera to capture lightning strikes, one for storms to the south and one for those to the north. The required difference in aperture and zoom is due to the presence of nearby lights on one side, which I have to work around.

I really like photographing lightning. When you capture a good strike—particularly if you happen to be looking through the viewfinder—it’s like looking into the eyes of a monster. Such power and menace, but only a fleeting glimpse.

See more photos in my natural world album.

This morning, whilst Jenn was at Yoga, I had a wander around Mort Bay, armed with my trusty camera phone. It was a great day for it and the scenery was ripe for some photos. I’m pretty happy with the results, which is not always the case with these phones.

The remnants of Balmain’s shipbuilding heritage are fascinating, and if nothing else it’s a pleasant spot to walk the dog or take baby for a stroll. I was pleased to find Ballast Point will be redeveloped to make more water-side parkland (as opposed to a Caltex grease facility). It’ll be a great place for New Year’s Eve and one less industrial blemish on our beautiful harbour.

At the moment, our favorite places are near the river/harbour and we’re looking forward to moving out of a flat and into a proper house somewhere like this, but I think we’ll be looking a little further down river :) Birchgrove and Balmain can be nice but way too expensive to get the space we want. But there are plenty of other great spots near the water.

After a scorching weekend, you pretty much had to expect a good ol’ electrical storm in Sydney, and last night it hit in spectacular style. From the early evening we could see it drifting in from the south-west, from the excellent vantage point of our second storey windows.

By about 10pm it (‘they’ is probably more applicable since there were several waves of storm fronts) was closing in and we had front row seats! It was the perfect opportunity to try out my new shutter-lock remote control for our camera (it’s an easy DIY project) and take some great photos of lightning.

I’ve wanted to do this for ages, since we have such a great view of the area to the west of our building and we often see some nice storm action. The only downside are the flood lights which light up the Police compound next door to us, they shine almost straight towards us and make bulb shots—and sleeping—quite tricky!

Unfortunately the photography had to stop just as the storm was getting on top of us, since I had an early flight to catch this morning. But the storm had other plans. Just as I put the camera away we experienced two of the loudest thunder claps I have ever heard, the lightning must have struck very close…maybe even our building.

Today the wild weather continued and on my return flight back into Sydney, there was some beautiful scenery above the clouds.

I’ve just added an album of panoramas to my photo gallery. Since panorama shots are quite trendy at the moment, I thought I’d show off some of ours. The shots are from our various travel adventures over the years, from such places as Paris, Malta, Egypt and the US. They’re all 1200 pixels wide in order to capture the panoramic effect, so they might be a bit slow to download.

Most of these shots were taken using our trusty old Canon IXUSv (in panorama mode) and stitched together using Canon’s PhotoStitch software. The results are fairly decent although there are some obvious flaws in most of the shots. Unfortunately the original shots have mostly been disposed of, in the interests of saving disk space, so it’s not possible to clean them up and re-stitch them.

I’ve recently been playing around with more modern stitching techniques, such Calico and Hugin for OSX (which produced the above shot of Stonehenge). It certainly gives our little Mac Mini a workout. And this is still using old shots, mostly 1600×1200 pixels, I can’t wait until I take some new ones with our new 350D!

See what people are blogging about: photos, panorama, stitch, PhotoStitch, Hugin, Panorama Tools, Canon IXUSv, Canon EOS 350D

It’s smokey again today in the city, the bushfires around Sydney aren’t getting any better. Which reminds me, two weekends ago Jenn and I went up the mountains to go bushwalking, only to find all the trails closed due to blazing fires. In fact the whole Grose valley was closed, and many other surrounding areas…all the places I used to hike frequently ‘as a younger man’.

The photos here were taken from the top of Govett’s Leap looking north toward Hat Hill Road and Perry’s Lookdown, which is where we had intended to go. It was going to be a lovely walk too, down Perry’s to Acacia Flats and the Bluegum Forest, but from the dense smoke billowing up from that area I’d say it will be a while before we’ll be doing that walk.

See what people are blogging about: bushfire, Sydney, hiking